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Penn State Prof Passes Gas

Gizmodo, that bastion of nerdtech writing, wrote yesterday about Penn State Environmental Engineering Professor Bruce Logan (He’s the older white gentleman). Logan’s current research projects include such mindblowing titles as, “Testing and Evaluation of System Materials for Creating a Scaleable Bioelectrically Assisted Microbial Reactor (BEAMR)”, and “Isolation and analysis of novel electochemically active bacteria for enhanced power generation in microbial fuel cells”, is credited by Giz with the creation of an “electric fart machine”.

Now, before you get all “Ewwwww”, the machine collects methane gas from tiny microbes.

It works like this: giving small jolts of electricity to single-celled microorganisms known as archea prompts them to remove C02 from the air and turn it into methane, released as tiny “farts.” The methane, in turn, can be used to power fuel cells or to store the electrical energy chemically until it’s needed.

How cool is that? Props to Professor Logan and his team. So, if you’ve walked around campus and you’ve smelt it, he probably dealt it.

Senior columns, with all their melodrama and platitudes, usually leave me eye-rolling and shaking my head with a vigor usually reserved for study abroad blog posts. But, as I graduate a week from today, I figured I should give it a go myself. Rather than discuss the origins of Onward State like Evan, I’d just like to briefly thank a few individuals who have defined my Penn State experience.

A Pennsylvania Disciplinary Board hearing began on Tuesday in Pittsburgh for former Penn State general counsel Cynthia Baldwin, who is accused of violating rules of professional conduct in her representation of former university administrators during the Jerry Sandusky investigation.